Northern Sotho is the only official South African language without an active Wikipedia. The project sits in the incubator, where it interestingly has far more articles than all other SA languages bar English and Afrikaans (540 vs Swati on 187).

Mohau Monaledi has been driving the project, and has contributed 1310 edits, more than everyone else put together, and was one of the original proposers in 2007. It's unfortunately quite difficult to get a project out of incubator these days, and the project needs some help to become an official Wikipedia.

The proposal is struggling to meet the following criterion: "develop an active test project; it must *remain active* until approval. It is generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active, not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months."

Mohau needs more support!

This would be a great project for our fledgling Wikimedia South Africa chapter to drive, and it would be a significant milestone to have all official South African languages represented by their own language Wikipedia. Northern Sotho has over 4 million speakers, and is the 4th most spoken language in South Africa. If you speak Northern Sotho, please help out! And if not, try recruit some Northern Sotho speakers. I will try to focus some work with my template translation tool on Northern Sotho as well.

To help: - go to the Northern Sotho site on the incubator - http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nso/Letlakala_la_Pele - and create an account. - start editing some articles! - add your name to the list of people interested in forming an editing community at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Sepedi

A key tracker is at: http://toolserver.org/~pathoschild/catanalysis/?cat=0&title=wp/nso&w... There needs to be at least 3 active (not grayed out) editors contributing for 3 consecutive months (there was in late 2009, but not recently).

Once this has been done, and it's probably the most significant remaining hurdle, we can start on the next stage of the approval process - see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Status/wp/nso for the details.

I've also posted this on my blog - http://www.greenman.co.za/blog/?p=741 - to spread the appeal a little wider.